It's been fun to watch Glenn Beck's meltdown into crazed depravity and insanity, but I think the time has come to strap him into the wheelchair and roll him out to the dogtrack.

First, he makes the rather...intriguing (to be uberpolite)...claim that George Soros orchestrated the Japanese reactor meltdown reaction.

Probably by praying to the heathen Jewish God Yaweh-- not the Angel Moroni *koffkoff*-- or by paying to have the HAARP antenna pointed at Japan to start the meltdown so he could rail against nuclear power, but I digress...

Then he reasasures his viewers last night that the meltdown is nothing to be concerned about...by using M&Ms. See, they don't melt in your hand, right?, and....

1) Welcome to American capitalism! These folks didn't steal anything, they didn't get bulk discounts, they didn't do anything except line up in droves early to buy as many iPads as they possibly could, then turned around and sold them at a hefty markup. I don't condone their actions, and I certainly don't approve of them, but that's the rules of the game, and they played them well.

2) This just goes to prove that even the President's supporters can be morons. Here's someone who wants to cut off America's nose to spite its face by drilling in more DANGEROUS places for oil than the Deepwater Horizon did and justifies it by saying: EARTHQUAKE! NUCLEAR POWER! And that's ignoring the proven deep environmental impact of just burning fossil fuels. But noooooooooooooo, immediate crises mean we should suspend thinking and get into totally reflexive reactive (no pun intended) mode!

3) For the record, I still support nuclear power as a clean but temporary alternative to fossil fuels until we've perfected the BTU output of solar and wind technologies. Which I'm sure this asshat will find some impeding doom in as well.

4) Here's a college professor I certainly would have attended extracurricular seminars (pun INtended) for.

Long time readers of my blog will note that I have, on occasion, made a gesture towards our Teabagging friends to try to persuade them that liberals are not the enemy: Corporate America is.

So I was heartened to see this article which carries my theme a little further down the field.

There's the wealthy and powerful, and then there's the rest of us (which includes me, who sort of falls near the crack between the two).

It didn’t take long for the light bulb to go off in my head once I got to the third paragraph to see truth in his article. The first and obvious is the recent bailouts, which included the bailouts to General Motors and Chrysler. The American people were sold on the bailouts being essential to save American jobs; perhaps there is some truth to that. However, it wasn’t long after the bailouts when GM began the talk of closing down American factories and building factories in China, Mexico, and Korea.

Left vs. Right became in government terms corporations vs. individuals. There was no guarantees(sic) in the bailouts, nothing that forced automakers to invest in our country. It was just easy money thrown their way at the expense of the taxpayer to make up for their bad corporate decisions.

You Teabaggers want populism? Here's populism. It's not about the government, who can be and must be answerable to us (but no longer is). It's about the monied interests who will do anything to advance their agenda, even destroying our lives.

And that's all of us, Teabaggers, left AND right and if you and I can't join forces, we will surely all hang separately.

I view this thru the lens that a landlord can prohibit pets in a rental apartment. So can condos and co-op boards. Smoking is a logical extension of that, given that smoke pervades the common areas, and creates a nuisance (nevermind if the building's ventilation system is faulty so that smoke gets exchanged between apartments).

Smoking is already banned in most hotels in the city. This is a measure who's time has come.

I always wondered why this man wasn't trotted out more often after 9/11.

There are plenty of American Muslims who could speak up and speak out about being a Muslim, but Ali would be foremost among them. Yes, I know, he's got Parkinson's disease and all that, but it would make his statement that much more poignant and that much more effective.

The fallout from Coward James O'Keefe's latest stunt is starting to build.

I mean, it's hard to add to Glenn Beck's deconstruction...yes, Glenn Beck...of the 11 minute faux NPR sting that O'Keefe cobbled together out of two hours of tape. I'm surprised O'Keefe is still standing and not curled up in some corner, sucking his thumb.

In the video, NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller and a colleague met with two members of a fictional Muslim group dangling a $5 million donation. Prodded by the "donors," Schiller said liberals "might be more educated" than conservatives, described Republicans as "anti-intellectual" and said the GOP had been "hijacked" by the "racist" Tea Party.

Or did he? After the tape became national news, and after NPR hastily sacrificed its CEO to appease critics, a video editor at the Blaze—a website founded by Fox News host Glenn Beck—compared the edited sting video and the two-hour original, also posted online.

Schiller did say some bad things, the Blaze found. But the short video took them out of context, like a bad reality show, and made them sound worse. It transposed remarks from a different part of the meeting to make it seem as if Schiller were amused by the group's "goal" of spreading Shari'a law. It left examples of his complimenting Republicans on the cutting-room floor.

And that Tea Party quote? Schiller was, for at least part of it, describing the views of some Republican friends.

This article will appear in this week's Time, on newsstands tomorrow. This will be the first many Americans even hear of the tape, aside from some watercooler and barroom bullshit their Teabagger friends have railed at them.

This is not good news for O'Keefe, his bear...I mean, mentor...Andrew Breitbart, the Teabaggers, or the GOP in Congress who are trying to cut NPR funding.

Amen. They all deserve to be kicked down a metaphorical flight of stairs.

Or for FOX News, either. Eventually, as Barnum would say, you can't fool some of the people all of the time if you keep fooling them and they find out about it. Barnum's greatest skill was not in the illusion, but in the escape. He left town (sometimes on a rail) before people realized they had been had.

Good snake-oil salesmen do that. Take the money and run, because if they catch up with you, they'll tear you limb from limb. You can take a little from a lot of people and they won't be bothered to track you down, but take a lot, especially over time, from people, and they form posses.

I'll tell you this much: bald-faced stupidity like this is certainly not going to gain her much attention, and no respect. Obama has allowed more off-shore drilling than the last three Presidents combined.

With good reason. As the US skipped merrily through the postwar era, our rivals and adversaries were busy rebuilding their nations, their infrastructure, their weaponry when they could. We pranced along as if in perpetual adolescent summer. Our fellow world was already looking at fall and even (nuclear) winter.

And then President Eisenhower sounded the alarm: we had missile gaps and infrastructure gaps and most important, as we watched the Soviet Union literally rocket skyward, we had a severe education gap, so much so that we imported former Nazi scientists left and right to try to catch up with Sputnik.

Money was funneled into education, into the interstate highways, into defense.

Americans are rushing to grab medicine against a threat that, if it even exists, is so miniscule as to be laughable?

Think about it: Chernobyl occured some 25 years ago and spread radiation as far south as Spain. No noticeable uptick in radiation disease was ever reported. Cancer rates remained reasonably stable.

That radiation cloud was immediately over densely populated areas.

Any Japanese radiation cloud that gets released would have to cross an entire ocean. An entire storm-laden, wind-driven, rainy-season ocean.

Yes, radiation would likely hit the States, certainly the far West like Alaska and Hawaii but in a nation where motorcycle helmet laws are debated, where guns are dispensed almost as easily as candy, where the First Lady is regularly raked over the coals for having the temerity to suggest that heart attacks in teenagers are a dangerous epidemic in the making, we're panicked over a few rems of radiation?

So President Obama is honoring the pasttime of any number of office workers around the nation and filling out a bracket. His love of basketball is a long-standing and well-known fact.

Yet, Geraghty for some bizarre reason believes that the fifteen minutes or so it takes to fill out a bracket (I did mine in five, but then I usually only hit about 80% of my picks) is somehow wasteful!

I didn't want to include this in the main article I posted today about the fallout from the Japanese disaster because it's actually trivial, but....

As I said earlier, if you're going to make a joke about a disaster, make sure it's funny. Bill Maher fell victim to his pot, I mean this bromide over the weekend, when he made a joke about the tsunami being the first thing to stop a Toyota Camry.

I still think my joke about the Japanese being used to devastation after Godzilla is on safe ground, however.

Another billionaire pussy who can't stand the idea that people need luxuries like police and fire departments dug into his deep pockets and came up with lint and not much else.If successful, it will be the largest recalled public official in American history.

You'd think the NRA would grow a set and actually sit down to a dialogue like this, but apparently not.

I suppose this gives them the opportunity to whine to their constituency that gun laws in America are oppressive and hell-bent on taking guns away from law-abiding citizens...um, yea, right...but here's the thing: only the low-normal morons that would buy that story would not see thru the pedagoguery and the simple fact that you had a chance and you forfeited it.

I'm of two minds about this: on the one hand, it's clear that he has enough strength to last a while longer, and I'm concerned about the fallout from when he solidifies his position, which means I'd really like to see him taken out now. On the other, any interference will be looked at with alarm by other nations in the region which can't be a good thing for a country still rebuilding its tattered image.

One of my passions in life is connections. I like to grasp how an event both occured and the consequences of that event by studying the ripples from and to other events.

For example, when Bush got elected, 9/11 happened. It probably would not have happened had Gore been confirmed as the duly elected President, because he would have continued Clinton's policies against Al Qaeda instead of taking his eye off the ball.

Bush being elected also created the biggest single national debt in human history, turning from a surplus that would pay off what was then a troubling debt (and imagine if we had those five trillion in the bank when the housing crisis hit) into a debt that not only consumed any possible budget residual but created a scenario where Bush was forced to encourage Americans to go deeply into debt, running up credit card balances and mortgages, whereby the nation is at the edge of the cliff of destruction.

Natural disaster like Katrina and the Sendai tsunami are a little harder to trace in terms of their antecedents. One can blame global climate change for Katrina, but that's not entirely true either. They are not called "acts of God" for nothing. Sometimes, shit happens.

But we can start to see the ripples of the Japanese disaster unfold, and it makes for an interesting thought experiment to expand on some of those.

Clearly, the economic impact has been so staggering that its only just now starting to come into focus. Not only is this impact being felt in Japan, but it's spreading beyond the borders quickly. China having problems with one of its main trading partners will hit us hard, as reliant as we are to the Chinese economy. Indeed, our two nations were already locked into a death spiral that threatened to send us to one war or another. Now, we're both going to swirl down and it's not an unlikely scenario that China will push down on our shoulders to keep their head above water (e.g. start calling in American debt).

The health and social concerns alone from the Japanese nuclear plant meltdowns could be another area of deep concern in Japan. If the disaster at Chernobyl is any indication, it could be twenty or thirty years before that region of Japan is habitable again. Worse, Chernobyl was home to only some 14,000 residents. By contrast, the most recent blast in Okuma immediately affects 10,000 people. Onagawa is home to 11,000 and if the Tokai plant goes, that's 35,000 more people affected. All will have to be permanently relocated and it's not like Japan is that large a nation to begin with. It's possible that 100,000 people will be refugees, and they'll have to go someplace.

Many of them will be ill with starvation and diseases like cholera and other sicknesses that crop up when disasters strike. If Haiti is any gauge, we could be looking at millions of critically sick Japanese over the longer term.

That's going to put enormous strain on the medical care system of Japan which, while very well run and very privatized, is still overseen by a government that may be forced to ration healthcare.

And that will happen after the private insurance companies have already set up their own "death panels."

More fallout (maybe that's a bad choice of word)...

Just as the world economy is starting to recover from the latest shocks to the system out of the Middle East comes word that semiconductor production will be affected due to the quake. This is no small matter as technology purchases have helped drive the world economy over the past ten years as nations try to leap from the 19th century to the 21st. Who knows what effect this will have on the world?

GM and Ford stand to benefit if the Japanese production lines are silent for too long. Even though many models of Toyota and other Japanese cars are made in America, many if not most of the components are shipped here from Japan.

My wife is a retired teacher, and the dozens of dollars she rakes in each month permit us lives of staggering opulence. Just the other day, we were privileged to choose between filling my 13-year-old mini-pickup with gas or paying the dentist.

Economics textbooks, along with Fox News and shout radio commentators, spread the myth that fortunes are gained productively by investing in capital equipment and employing labour to produce goods and services that people want to buy. This may be how economies prosper, but it is not how fortunes are most easily made. One need only to turn to the 19th-century novelists such as Balzac to be reminded that behind every family fortune lies a great theft, often long-forgotten or even undiscovered.

But who is one to steal from? Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because (to paraphrase Willie Sutton) that's where the assets are to take. Throughout history the world's most successful economies have been those that have kept this kind of primitive accumulation in check. The US economy today is faltering largely because its past barriers against rent-seeking are being breached.

Nowhere is this more disturbingly on display than in Wisconsin. Today, Milwaukee – Wisconsin's largest city, and once the richest in America – is ranked among the four poorest large cities in the United States. Wisconsin is just the most recent case in this great heist. The US government itself and its regulatory agencies effectively are being privatised as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine.

Warren Buffet famously observed that no one is a self-made man: we all rely on other people and free resources to create our wealth, and we appropriate it as ours. Indeed, studies have shown that if we factor in the replacement costs for things that nature provides to our economic activity-- sunlight, air, water, pollination and so on-- we could easily double the costs of manufacturing in America (some studies show these costs are actually twice as high as the artificial production costs, thus tripling the costs to produce.)

George Will (of all people) also observed further that the American economy is one where profits are privatized but losses are spread out to society as a whole.

American history truly IS about theft for wealth. If it's not out and out piracy of someone else's property, then it's a grab for land and resources that no one else either wants or knows what to do with, without appropriate reimbursement.

Think about all those cowboy movies you saw back as a child where the ranchers battled the farmers over water rights, or mining companies would steal farms from families, and so on. Or even just ponder the tragic concept of slavery.

We've run out of the "free" resources, and so now have to cannibalize each other. This is the America we've left to ourselves. Rather than learn to live within our means, we've consistently expanded our resources so that we delay the inevitable accounting for what we've done to the land and to each other.

Why am I being FORCED to turn my clocks ahead one hour? Just because President Obsama's storm troopers demand it? To "save" daylight?

Why are liberals always trying to "save" something? Save the whales, save the forests, save daylight...I swear, who are they to tell me what I should do with my daylight? It's MY daylight and if I want to spend it on hookers and blow, that's MY choice! Liberals hate choice! I'm an American! It's MY daylight!

You know who else "saved daylight"?

You know what "Daylight Savings Time" is? It's a plot by lefties to shove the solar energy agenda down our throats, to aid and abet their Arab brethren so they can fund terrorism! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE! We have to STOP these morans! Next they'll tell us if we want to sleep into the daytime that we're saving, we can wear eye mosques! NO MORE MOSQUES! NO MOSQUES! NO MOSQUES! ROBERTO DURAN WAS RIGHT! NO MOSQUES!

Want proof it's a liberal plot?

OK, Daylight Savings Time was invented by Benjamin Franklin. His mother was Abigail Folger. Of Folger's coffee. And everyone knows the Tea Party is the ONLY TRUE PATRIOTS IN AMERICA!

More: Franklin appears on the hundred dollar bill. The hundred dollar bill is how libs do coke. DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?????

Still more: Franklin invented electricity. Electricity gives us, what? MORE DAYLIGHT AT NIGHT so libs can hold secret meetings with Osama bin Laden to plot the downfall of America!

Also, electricity comes from oil and natural gas. Oil is what Arabs make in the dessert! We're supporting terorrists by using electricity! Libs invented electricity and Arabs invented oil and we're funding the Islamoliberal assault on our schools and our children! The Dhimmicrats are laughing at you RIGHT NOW because you're using their electricity!

We have to come up with good old American electricity! Not oil or natural gas. And not coal because the Chinese invented coal and so we can't turn Commie now!

What's left? THE SUN! We invented the sun! Before America, there was no sun! The French king didn't refer to himself as The Sun King until AFTER we were revolting against England, who only gets rain!

That's right, my fellow American patriots! We must IMMEDIATELY convert to solar power, which means we have to save daylight! Who's with me? It's time to save daylight! It's daylights savings time!

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing